"I first met Douglas, he tells me, in 1996 when he was a trainee at Levenes, he reinvented himself I think from being a signer to being a lawyer and he was just doing his training contact with David Ruebain at Levenes, and he was then beginning to show the signs, I think the word is ‘up and coming’ of being a star education lawyer and it was a privilege for me to work with him at that stage. He also was working at that stage, and you will see where this comes back into the story in a minute, with a young woman called Natasha.

Douglas stayed at Levenes for a number of years and then, for reasons I never completely understood, he moved with Natasha, to Alexander Harris, which some of you will know at that stage was by and large a clinical negligence firm, and Douglas was there again for several years;

And then I guess, it must be almost exactly five and a bit years ago, Douglas rang me up one day and said “David I’ve got to have lunch with you” so I said great, go and have lunch. So Douglas and I had lunch in a basement café somewhere off Holborn and he started off, very sombre. He said “David I’ve got something very serious to tell you. I’ve got this degenerative condition, I have just been diagnosed and it’s only going to get worse” and I thought, oh God this is a very terrible story, where can this go and he said, “but, I’ve got this great idea. I’m going to leave Alexander Harris and I’m gonna set up my own firm.”

In a way this encapsulated Douglas to my mind, then and since, which was his response to potential great adversity, to bounce back and do something incredibly brave and ambitious. And he then described to me the model of what this firm would like, and how they would behave and all the rest of it, and he talked about information technology and all these things and actually, looking back on it now, as you have spotted from the previous contributions, Douglas is a great planner, he had the whole thing planned out then, not quite on a napkin, perhaps more on a spreadsheet. But what we are now looking back on five years of success in relation to, is actually what Douglas thought about, not necessarily as his response to, but certainly in the context of, what for other people would have been a moment to reflect and perhaps step backwards.

Douglas was stepping forward and we, the recipients of all of that planning and implementation by Douglas, have only been the gainers for it. And here he is now today, incredibly successful, thriving, on the top of his game and all the rest of it; but as Jane says, not just Douglas, it is also the rest of his team, Erica, different brands as she goes under, is a key part of that team, Jane has mentioned some other people in that team, I’ve mentioned somebody else, Natasha, who has gone with Douglas throughout that period, through Levenes when he was a trainee, through Alexander Harris, and now to Douglas’ own firm.

And those of you who deal with the team will know quite how important all of those people have been and are still in what the team delivers and they really do, to use that horrible expression, they really do ‘punch above their weight’ in terms of the influence they have, in terms of the service they provide to people and so on.

Let me just give you one example of their innovation because Douglas, I mentioned information technology, perhaps, I don’t know, as a reaction to knowing from the outset that his own communication would in due course become more and more impaired, Douglas embraced information technology in a way which is quite outstanding. I think the firm is still ahead of their game on the IT stuff.

Douglas’ website is the best website of any website of any firm of solicitors that I know. It is the most accessible; it is the most communicative; it tells people how to go and fight their own SEN Tribunal, which is an odd thing you might think for a lawyer who is trying to get business to do, but actually its not that at all; what Douglas does is, through his website he empowers people who only have access to the web, to go as far as they can on their own to the best of their ability and then to come to him, if they can and if they need to, to deal with the more complicated matters, but that is an act of empowerment for people who aren’t even his clients, which I think is fantastic.

All of you will have had, I suspect, you are probably all on Douglas’s round robin emails. You will all have had the email which says “which virtual Douglas do you prefer this week, do you want me to look like a woman or have an American voice?” You will all have seen the virtual Douglas. I think its fantastic, I want to know what he does at the weekend! If this is his alter ego presented on the computer what does he actually do at the weekend!

Anyway, Douglas and his team have embraced different ways of delivering services, I remember Douglas when he first came across Skype he said this is fantastic, I can get a client in Newcastle or wherever, I could ring them up and say have you got broadband, yes, let me send you a webcam and I’ll talk to you on Skype.

You know all of those things, he was ahead of the game, not just I think because circumstances forced him to do that but actually because he saw that rightly as a way to deliver legal services and a way to meet the needs of his clients, and that has led and I have been privileged to be a bit of part of this Douglas, not just to meet the meet the needs of some individuals in a fantastic way but actually to be at the cutting edge of some of the case law.

Andy read ahead in his script and talked about one of the things that I was supposed to talk about but I’ll do it anyway. Douglas wanted me to talk about a couple of cases that he and I have been involved in where his work has been influential in not just changing things for an individual client or family or whatever but also more strategically. So one case where we were arguing about the meaning of the new, as it was then, legislation which empowered parents to insist with more force on including their child in a mainstream school - not forcing them to do it but empowering them where they wanted to do that - and against all the odds, I think, Douglas and I were able to persuade the Court of Appeal as to what the law meant, that the parents really did have that that role.

And then last year, again a case which would have had much wider implications about what LEAs have to do when children are going from primary school to secondary school, and basically stopping LEAs from trying to keep parents away from the Tribunal by not amending statements of SEN at the point of secondary transfer. And again I know from the subsequent cases I have been involved in since Douglas and I were involved in that case, that that has had more than ripples out there in impacting on children and it will continue to do so. Those benefits are to some extent long lived although the slight caveat on the inclusion one is that David Cameron is committed to reversing all that legislation if he gets into power so I think there is a potential sting in the tail there.

But Douglas and his team, as I say, have been at the top of their game dealing with their clients, pushing back the law in the interests of disabled children, children with SEN and their parents who are fighting for those things. And really it’s a phenomenon, quite a phenomenon, that they done all that, with so little, in such a short time, from nowhere; that’s absolutely amazing against, competitors is the wrong word, against other firms which have been around a lot longer with far more people and much greater resources.

So I think its an absolute testament, not just to Douglas, to all of them, but Douglas in particular, that that’s happened. I do congratulate them all, a fantastic team, I congratulate, I keep mentioning Natasha I know but she has been around from the beginning, and she does I think deserve special attention because she has stuck around from the very beginning.

I think you have all done absolutely fantastically, as Jane said, let’s look forward to the 10 year anniversary and beyond that; and everybody who has got a glass if you could just raise your glass, because I am the last speaker so it falls to me a privileged position to say, here’s to Douglas, Erica, and the rest of the team, many, many congratulations and a happy birthday and I won’t ask you to sing. Congratulations!"